[🚀 Feature]: [java] Ordered version of getWindowHandles()

[abhishekmali1950-ops]

Description

Hi Selenium Team,

I’m quite new to Selenium, still learning and practicing, so apologies if this suggestion sounds basic.

Right now, driver.getWindowHandles() returns a Set. Since a Set is unordered, when we convert it into a List/ArrayList, the order of window handles is not guaranteed. Many beginners (including me at first) end up using indexing after converting it to a List, which doesn’t always give the expected result.

I know the best practice is to loop and check by title/URL, but I was thinking — would it make sense to provide an additional method like getWindowHandlesOrdered() which returns the handles in the order they were opened?

It might help people (especially beginners) who assume index-based navigation will work, and make test code a bit simpler in cases where order matters.

Thank you for considering this idea 🙏

Have you considered any alternatives or workarounds?

No response

[selenium-ci]

@abhishekmali1950-ops, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

Selenium Triage Team: remember to follow the Triage Guide

[cgoldberg]

Which language bindings are you referring to?

[abhishekmali1950-ops]

Which language bindings are you referring to?

I was referring to the Java language bindings. The example I shared (WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();) was written in Java.

[pujagani]

Hey! So Selenium returns the window handles it receives from the browser. Java uses a linked hash set internally to map the list to the set. There is no way we have any information from the browser about the order in which they were opened. It is simply returning what we get and browsers are implementing the API based on the spec https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver2/#get-window-handles

[github-actions]

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